Critic Reviews

Bulletstorm is a total revelation for the FPS genre. At a time when the majority of first person shooters offer a very similar experience, Bulletstorm gives the genre a “boot in the butt”. A must play for anyone and an early contender for game of the year.

Forget your preconceptions of Bulletstorm as a foul-mouthed big dumb action game. It’s an intelligent, nuanced design with fathoms of depth, which marks a return to the importance of player creativity in shooters and simultaneously evolves the concept of interactivity in an FPS world. And with two cleverly complimentary secondary modes, it will have serious legs for a good long while to come.

Small gripes aside, there’s no denying Bulletstorm’s blissful action. Epic Games/People Can Fly’s sadistic opus arrives at a time when most shooters do little more than let you blast dudes in the head while things explode. Bulletstorm has those things, but also lets you shoot a man in the testicles and kick slide his head off.

In attempting to mix up the genre, People Can Fly and Epic have created a shooter that is worthy of anyone’s praise. How much you get out of Bulletstorm is limited only by your creativity and those people who are quick-thinking and methodical will certainly get the most out of it. With a solid campaign, an interesting co-op multiplayer mode and the never-ending Echoes mode, there’s plenty of life in this beast to keep you knee-deep in “dick-tits” and “pus-dicks” until you think you are one.

Bulletstorm isn't for everyone, but it's definitely one of the most unique shooters I've played in some time. The combination of its over-the-top story and inventive, addictive gameplay make it a memorable experience from start to finish. Most of all, it's downright fun -- something lacking in too many games these days.

Bulletstorm is everything it promised and more. A couple bugs hold it back from being perfect and some competitive online modes would have been nice, but overall, it’s a real refreshing addition to the already too crowded FPS market. The Skillshot system is brilliant and the combat is just so satisfying and enjoyable. I couldn’t see many FPS fans not liking this one and for the sheer inventiveness, creativity and freshness alone I would recommend a purchase. EPIC Games has once again proven that they craft fantastic games and you can expect Bulletstorm to still be on people’s minds when those GOTY conversations come up.

Bulletstorm’s frantic action and M-rated, blood-drenched gameplay harken back to earlier generations of shooters, but its richly detailed design, outstanding visuals and the innovative Skillshot system mean that the game easily transcends its “return to roots” vibe for an experience that’s easily one of this year’s best.

I have no doubts in my mind that People Can Fly have developed a great game. They have tried to do something different and unique and yet have successfully implemented it, a combination which is a rarity these days. If you had enough of the good guys catching the bad guys type of games, then I would suggest pick up a copy of Bulletstorm now.

Bulletstorm is one of the finest single player games I’ve played in a long time. I can’t remember the last time I was up to 5am playing any game. It’s a pity about the lack of competitive multiplayer, but Echoes and Anarchy game modes do add some longevity to it. Even without them, though, it is definitely worth the asking price. If you like shooters, sci-fi, a good revenge story or giant robot dinosaurs, then Bulletstorm has something for you.

In a video game market that seems oversaturated with first-person shooters, it's remarkable that the folks at People Can Fly could create a new, unique property like Bulletstorm. When the game was announced last year, my initial reaction was that it was going to end up like Platinum Games' Madworld title on the Wii: a great concept that couldn't sustain itself past the five-hour mark. Having enjoyed Bulletstorm, I'm pleasantly surprised and definitely looking forward to the inevitable sequel.

Bulletstorm is the Summer Movie Blockbuster of the videogame world. It is big, brash and bold. We would say it isn't clever, but that would be doing it a disservice. The thought and effort that has gone into producing such a fun experience deserves as much recognition as it can possibly get.

Bulletstorm is, truly, a strange bird in the world of shooters. It doesn't offer the rich backstory and characters of a game like BioShock, but damned if I didn't laugh countless times during the many outbursts of colorful language from its cast. Like its innovative predecessors, Bulletstorm goes against the grain of the popular norm, often in exciting and hilarious ways, and though it's not perfect, it's still one hell of a ride.

At a time when games are brimming with gritty realism, a single-minded approach to multiplayer and oh-so-serious plots characterised by a chorus of military buzz-words, Bulletstorm is a refreshing departure from the norm. Behind the f-bombs and dick-tits are some incredibly mature and well thought out mechanics. Not only does the Skillshot system invite a completely new approach to shooting in single-player, it uses scores and leaderboards to inspire competition in a completely different vein to the amalgamate of contemporary shooters. Given the current landscape of the genre, it's fair to say that Bulletstorm is not only a great game, but an important one, too.

Bulletstorm didn't necessarily invent all of the things it gets so much mileage from. Alongside blood relatives Gears of War and Painkiller, there are large chunks of everything from The Club and Time Crisis to Duke Nukem and Vanquish floating around in its genome. Its peculiar magic, however, lies in the way that it manages to coat its sharp arcade ideas with a comforting big-budget campaign to help lure players of all types in. This is a game that wants you to laugh so hard that you sneeze on yourself, but it's also a game that wants you to experiment as much as possible with the tools you've been given. Its cleverness is as lightly worn as it is unexpected. It's the best kind of guilty pleasure.

The ink on the blueprints for the standard first-person shooter experience has dried. Developers seem to have mastered the art of delivering a solid and fun triple-A shooter experience, to the point where it almost seems effortless. It’s always about “bigger” and “more,” with little else to set games apart. With Bulletstorm, Epic and People Can Fly not only succeed at delivering the “bigger” and the “more,” but bring with it a gameplay slant that makes it a one-of-a-kind experience. Yes, it may be brazenly outrageous and juvenile; be prepared to check your “Serious Business Adult” card at the door. But lurking underneath is a seriously fun, novel take on the first-person shooter genre that shouldn't be ignored. Just make sure you don’t “play it wrong.”

While Bulletstorm could’ve used a little more balancing in the multiplayer department and maybe some more coding work on the AI, it’s an overall fun ride that’s been well worth the wait. What you get out of the game specifically depends on what you put into your kills – be as sick as you want to be, and you’ll reap the rewards. Despite the short single player mode, this one is definitely worth coming back to. So get on it, dicktits - Bulletstorm is a winner.

Whether Bulletstorm is a parody of other action games, a celebration of gaming's collective macho stupidity or both, it works out pretty well. If you can make peace with the ridiculous vibe, it's almost a sure thing that you'll have fun with it. It doesn't have the legs to sustain it for months, so you might want to approach the game as one of its characters would approach a leather-clad Mad Max reject: Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.

Bulletstorm is a love letter to old shooters. The Duke Nukems, the Serious Sams, and the Painkillers. This game is crude, crass, and juvenile. It lacks subtlety and contains some of the most unlikeable protagonists I have ever played. It is everything that keeps video games from being considered a serious art form, and yet it's still a ton of fun to play. Bulletstorm isn't concerned with K/D ratios, customizing weapons, or $15 map packs. It's all about taking out enemies in the most creative way possible. It's pure visceral combat and pulls no punches for delivering it. Despite its vulgarity, I hope more games like this stay around a while.

Bulletstorm, in short, looks good, plays great, and is fun as f**k to play. So put that in your pipe and smoke it Call of Duty fans...I come from the old school, and my friends of frag fest...this game is old school with a new coat of paint. Enjoy!

At the end of the day, this is a pretty solid entry. I’ll give it a 4 out 5 stick rating, and recommend it for those looking for mayhem to go along with their FPS experience. And for those who can say they’re old enough to stand by the ESRB M rating.

Bulletstorm is the equivalent of a summer time big-screen Hollywood blockbuster. Sure it is fun and features plenty of eye candy which pushes the limits of the Xbox 360’s hardware but it lacks in depth and substance. The lack of multiplayer options, short single player mode and lack of a cooperative mode where I can play through the entire campaign from beginning to end with a friend were all significant issues for me. There is no question, Bulletstorm has all the ingredients to be considered a ‘Triple A’ title. Yet at the end of the day, Bulletstorm will likely only wet the appetite of Gears of War fans until the next instalment arrives later this year.

Bulletstorm is the banana cream pie the genre needs thrown in its face. It doesn’t have a gripping plot and doesn’t concern itself with trying to construct one. Bulletstorm is much more concerned about providing insane amounts of options for the player to dish out pain on enemies in a colorful environment. Its drawbacks are that there’s no multiplayer to speak of and there’s not much supplementary content after beating the (admittedly very fun) campaign. It’s hard to tell if Bulletstorm’s silly demeanor and in depth combat mechanics are going to catch on, but despite the problems that keep it several rungs away from the gold it’s a very entertaining and unique take on the genre.

So just to sum up *ahem*. Bullestorm is no Son of a Dick. Some scenes were so impressive they scared the dick off me. If you criticize the basic gameplay I WILL kill your dick. But enough talk of dick killing. This is a game that’s over faster than an assplosion. You’ll love it, but probably won’t play through it again unless it gave you a real murder-boner. Even then, it’s over in about six hours and it’s easier to beat than pussy-zilla. While the game may be sweeter than teenage poontang, we’ll need to wait for a sequel and hope for a story with less dick tits as characters. Until then, Bulletstorm will be a remembered as a very good game, but not a great one. *sorry*

Apart from a couple of brief lapses, Bulletstorm is a game that knows precisely who and what it is: a glorious throwback dressed in all of our modern finery. An obsession with points and leaderboards certainly, but also with experimentation and refining of a craft. The biggest surprise is perhaps the best. Once you peel back the layers of the swearing and bravado you find that this a game that gets better and more involving the more you play. So maybe the 80’s and Bulletstorm aren’t so similar. That decade gets more embarassing and distant as time passes, People Can Fly’s new game gets better with age. Who would have thought it?!

Overall I really enjoyed Bulletstorm because of its solid and extremely fun gameplay. I didn’t play through the singleplayer because of the characters, the story or the colorful dialogue, I played through it in spite of those things just because I was having so much finding different ways to kill people. The game really doesn’t have much replay value other than going back and trying to get all the different skillshots and some limited multiplayer. In the end I would highly recommend playing Bulletstorm if creatively killing enemies sounds like your kind of thing.

For all that I have said about Bulletstorm thus far I can wrap it up by saying that Bulletstorm is flat out good game. Although not the cream of the crop Bulletstorm has enough going for it that if you’re a fan of the genre its definitely worth a look.

Bulletstorm is a fun, breezy, and puerile romp. If you play games for the fun of it all, this shooter delivers, giving you some neat weapons and mechanics, and rewarding you for your topflight technique. Unspectacular online play, an abundance of shooter cliches, and forced vulgarity keep it from joining the shooter elite. But the creativity of the skillshot system paired with the engrossing nature of moving up the Echoes leaderboards gives Bulletstorm some muscle and will inspire a dedicated following of talented players eager to show off their incredible mastery of its gratifying mechanics.

Bulletstorm kerb-stomps the dominant FPS orthodoxy, replacing tired old conventions with fresh new mechanics. Its gorgeous sci-fi aesthetic and fluid ultraviolent action make the game almost as fun to watch as it is to play and, although it lacks adversarial deathmatches, Bulletstorm's Echoes and Anarchy modes significantly extend its appeal.

Under a limited dosage Bulletstorm's might come off as crass and pandering, but when swallowed whole it starts to feel indispensible and, of all things, endearing. People Can Fly and Epic Games, seemingly bored with the state of first person shooters, have cranked out one of the most objectively offensive titles in recent memory, but pulled a fast one by backing it up with clever, fresh and addicting mechanics wholly absent in every one of its peers. I'm not sure who the joke is on, but everyone wins.

Bulletstorm is about as close to an M-rated Disney ride of a game as you’re likely to ever play. Everything about it is designed to make you cheer and yell and laugh with visceral delight, making it relatively impossible to not have an absolute blast while playing it, regardless of what type of gamer you are. The combo system can lose its novelty after a bit, but there’s always a bigger and more insane sequence around the corner to keep things fresh. For fans of sky high thrills and action on a mountainous scale, Bulletstorm is an absolutely must play, and is one of the hands-down nuttiest experiences you’ll have in a game all year.

Bulletstorm demonstrates the value of "why" for action games. Taken out of the context of its fiction, People Can Fly would have something fun but forgettable on their hands, but the way Bulletstorm fits together results in something cool and memorable. Multiplayer failings notwithstanding, Bulletstorm shines as a single-player shooter. Despite its crass humor and wang-flinging bravado, it's got some real character and heart to it. I'm not happy about the story's sequel-bait belly flop of an ending, but I'm excited to see where Grayson and Bulletstorm go next.

While I am hard on the plot in Bulletstorm, it's an experience that'll long stay with me because what it is, is unique. In a world where we're up to our necks in war games, it's refreshing when something like this comes along and steals focus – if only for a little while. Grayson Hunt has no chance of being the Duke Nukem of this generation, but kudos to him for trying.

It's nice to see something different step out of the drab monotoned generic shooter genre. To see environments with colour and life as opposed to the grey warn torn settings we are bombarded with is enough to warrant Bulletstorm praise. If you can get past the vulgarity of the characters you will find an engaging shooter that is a lot of fun and has a decent story that is well worth your time.

It was really hard to score this bad boy. There were parts that I absolutely loved and parts I bitterly despised at the same time and that’s the crux of Bulletstorm. It has a bunch of really neat ideas, but they just don’t seem fully fleshed out. Grayson doesn’t move nearly as fluidly as you’d expect and a lot of the sexiest charged attacks aren’t available until very late in the piece, while the over-the-top friendship between bromigos Grayson and Ishi gets all touchy-feely, taking with it a generous portion of the B-Grade shine. It makes it so close, yet so far in so many categories, which is surprising for a title that supposedly revels in its balls-to-the-wall attitude. I feel the best way to score it, is to embrace its “three quarters of the way there” mentality and mark it accordingly. Bulletstorm is by no means a bad game, but somehow still leaves you disappointed by the time you reach the final act.

Bulletstorm may be a sick, filthy game that you may not want to show to everyone, but at least it knows it is and simply doesn't care. It's much more interested in whether or not you can slam three shotgun shots into that guy you just flung into the air.

There's a point when Gray tells his mouthy companion, "You're trying too hard. Just relax and let the overcompensating come natural-like." Bulletstorm is violence distilled into a bombshell of unbridled mayhem that tries to be so over the top and brutal that it often struggles to live up to its own posturing. Setting a guy on fire, blowing out his esophagus, and impaling him on a wall of spikes is morbidly entertaining, but violence for the sake of violence is also a short-lived novelty.

Bulletstorm, as the name suggests, is just noise. You’ll kill stuff for six to eight hours, turn off your machine, and you probably won’t put it on again. With that in mind, it’s difficult to see it as a complete game. I have nothing against shorter games, but when they’re this base, it’s hard to justify it. It’s a fun game for what its worth, but Bulletstorm should have been more than just a joke of an FPS that gets it’s knob out when it gets drunk.

You are looking at about 5 to 6 hours to complete the main campaign that comes with an cliffhanger ending that feels like a middle finger in your face from People Can Fly. Add in the level ending bugs, brain-dead AI as well as the barrage of terrible humor and you are left with a game that doesn't live up to the hype. However, the story can be entertaining and the level of strategy that can be applied to each enemy encounter is surprisingly fresh for a first person shooter. Plus if you enjoyed the co-op modes in Gears, you are likely to dig the Anarchy and Echo modes. I am shocked that a co-op campaign mode didn't make it into the game though. The ideal market for this game would probably be shooter fanatics that have a low-brow sense of humor. Those easily offended or prefer more team based shooters need not apply.

Bulletstorm is a game unsure of what it wants to achieve. When it lets itself, it's a fantastic adrenaline rush through well-constructed set-pieces and gloriously fun-to-watch violence. But it too often drags itself down with overly structured situations and restrictive, strategy-heavy gameplay. It feels like if chaos had been allowed to take the design process over, this could have had one of the most fun shooters of our generation, but as it stands, Bulletstorm is a mechanically enjoyable game that's missing what it needed to be great.

Bulletstorm is lucky. It’s lucky that the core gameplay, action, and design is so good, because the rest of the elements of the game are absolute drivel. This game could have been much better if it had retained the linear focus of greater Epic titles like Unreal Tournament, or in People Can Fly’s case, Painkiller. It’s weird to have a pedigree of such greatness, and create such a middling title. This game gets a C, and in this case that should stand for “Could have gotten a B”.